Incidental Music from The Dark Outside by Stuart McLean

Some music which shouldn’t exist but captured forever. If that sounds paradoxical, it’s because it is ambient music from broadcasts in a forest in Scotland with a limited radius. That makes it sound more prosaic and less wondrous than it really is. Ephemeral feelings of the dark opened to the light.

Stuart explains all this a bit better as “The Dark Outside came about in 2012 after The Galloway Forest Dark Skies Park’s Artists in Residence that year, Robbie Coleman & Jo Hodges, basically gave me an FM Radio Transmitter to do what I liked with for 24 hours. I came up with this instead – 24 hours of music that people had never heard before broadcasting from a place where nobody was listening (this has since changed as people turned up to listen). The broadcast airs from Murrays Monument, a 50 foot granite monolith upon a hill called Big Doon in Talnotry which is in the Galloway Forest Dark Skies Park. This site was chosen specifically as FM works from line-of-sight, which hems the listener (due to the geology and landscape) into a specific area where you really have to travel out into a forest to listen to the radio.”

There are 33 tracks ranging from not more than 20 seconds to a few minutes. The brevity is because these are “the station ident music backing tracks for The Dark Outside broadcasts 2012, 2013, 2014 & 2015.” The sound is largely drone ambient. The mood is wistful and isolated. Although created as idents it actually has a coherence that makes it something to listen to as a collection, rather than individual tracks. Gloriously glacial, granite ambient. Please buy. It’s only £2.